ing to the heart rather than to the head, may last when more pretentious poetry shall have passed away. Neither criticism nor contemporary popularity can decide such questions.

Scott himself seemed to take a true view. In a letter to Miss Seward, he said:

"The immortality of poetry is not so firm a point in my creed as the immortality of the soul.

'I've lived too long,

And seen the death of much immortal song.'

Nay, those that have really attained their literary immortality have gained it under very hard conditions. To some it has not attached till after death. To others it has been the means of lauding personal vices and follies which had otherwise been unremembered in their epitaphs; and all enjoy the same immortality under a condition similar to that of Noureddin in an Eastern tale. Noureddin, you remember, was to enjoy the gift of immortality, but with this qualification,—that he was subjected to long naps of forty, fifty, or a hundred years at a time. Even so Homer and Virgil slumbered through whole centuries. Shakspeare himself enjoyed undisturbed sleep from the age of Charles I., until Garrick waked him. Dryden's fame has nodded; that of Pope begins to be drowsy; Chaucer is as sound as a top, and Spenser is snoring in the midst of his commentators. Milton, indeed, is quite awake; but, observe, he was at his very outset refreshed with a nap of half-a-century; and in the midst of all this we sons of degeneracy talk VOL. XIII-7

of immortality! Let me please my own generation, and let those who come after us judge of their facts and my performances as they please; the anticipation of their neglect or censure will affect me very little."

In 1812 the poet-lawyer was rewarded with the salary of a place whose duties he had for some years performed without pay, that of Clerk of Sessions, worth £800 per annum. Thus having now about £1500 as an income, independently of his earnings by the pen, Scott gave up his practice as an advocate, and devoted himself entirely to literature. At the same time he bought a farm of somewhat more than a hundred acres on the banks of the beautiful Tweed, about five miles from Ashestiel, and leaving to its owners the pretty place in which he had for six years enjoyed life and work, he removed to the cottage at Abbotsford, for thus he named his new purchase, in memory of the abbots of Melrose, who formerly owned all the region, and the ruins of whose lovely abbey stood not far away. Of the £4000 for this purchase half was borrowed from his brother, and the other half on the pledge of the profits of a poem that was projected but not written, - "Rokeby."

Scott ought to have been content with Ashestiel; or, since every man wishes to own his home, he should have been satisfied with the comfortable cottage which he built at Abbotsford, and the modest improvements

that his love for trees and shrubs enabled him to make. But his aspirations led him into serious difficulties. With all his sagacity and good sense, Scott never seemed to know when he was well off. It was a fatal mistake both for his fame and happiness to attempt to compete with those who are called great in England and Scotland, — that is, peers and vast landed proprietors. He was not alone in this error, for it has generally been the ambition of fortunate authors to acquire social as well as literary distinction, thus paying tribute to riches, and virtually abdicating their own true position, which is higher than any that rank or wealth can give. It has too frequently been the misfortune of literary genius to bow down to vulgar idols; and the worldly sentiments which this idolatry involves are seen in almost every fashionable novel which has appeared for a hundred years. In no country is this melancholy social slavery more usual than in England, with all its political freedom, although there are noble exceptions. The only great flaw in Scott's character was this homage to rank and wealth.

On the other hand, rank and wealth also paid homage to him as a man of genius; both Scotland and England received him into the most select circles, not only of their literary and political, but of their fashionable, life.

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In 1811 Scott published "The Lord of the Isles," and in 1813," Rokeby," neither of which was remarkable for either literary or commercial success, although both were well received. In 1814 he edited a nineteenvolume edition of Dean Swift's works, with a Life, and in the same year began almost by accident-the real work of his own career, in "Waverley."

If public opinion is far different to-day from what it was in Scott's time in reference to his poetry, we observe the same change in regard to the source of his widest fame, his novels, but not to so marked a degree, for it was in fiction that Scott's great gifts had their full fruition. Many a fine intellect still delights in his novels, though cultivated readers and critics differ as to their comparative merits. No two persons will unite in their opinions as to the three of those productions which they like most or least. It is so with all famous novels. Then, too, what man of seventy will agree with a man of thirty as to the comparative merits of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand? How few read "Uncle Tom's Cabin," compared with the multitudes who read that most powerful and popular book forty years ago? How changing, if not transient, is the fame of the novelist as well as of the poet! With reference to him even the same generation changes its tastes.

What filled us with delight as young men or women of twenty, is at fifty spurned with contempt or thrown aside with indifference. No books ever filled my mind and soul with the delight I had when, at twelve years of age, I read "The Children of the Abbey" and "Thaddeus of Warsaw." What man of eighty can forget the enthusiasm with which he read "Old Mortality" or "Ivanhoe" when he was in college?

Perhaps one test of a great book is the pleasure derived from reading it over and over again, as we read "Don Quixote," or the dramas of Shakspeare, of whose infinite variety we never tire. Measured by this test, the novels of Sir Walter Scott are among the foremost works of fiction which have appeared in our world. They will not all retain their popularity from generation to generation, like "Don Quixote' or "The Pilgrim's Progress" or "The Vicar of Wakefield;" but these are single productions of their authors, while not a few of Scott's many novels are certainly still read by cultivated people, if not with the same interest they excited when first published, yet with profit and admiration. They have some excellencies which are immortal, elevation of sentiment, chivalrous regard for women, fascination of narrative (after one has waded through the learned historical introductory chapters), the absence of exaggeration, the vast variety of characters introduced and